Stewart Copeland: All Hail Oyster, er, Foot?

by Mike DohertyThere's one thing that can be said for being part of the biggest band on the planet, even if the experience is sometimes trying and even if it only lasts a short while: chances are it will give you the chance to do whatever you want with the rest of your life. Assuming the experience hasn't killed you, you can either grasp backwards for past glories or look ahead to whatever you might have in mind, no matter how self-indulgent. When The Police broke up in 1986 after an abortive recording session, drummer Stewart Copeland already had another career in place: he'd been composing music for films, starting with Rumble Fish in '83. Copeland has stuck with his soundtracking muse since then, emerging every once in a while to form a band, such as the jazz-influenced pop trio Animal Logic in the late '80s and early '90s and the African Rhythmatists ensemble in the mid '90s. Nonetheless, his drumming — an oft-underrated key to The Police sound — has been sadly underrepresented on disc for some time, mainly because he's been doing very little of it.
Steward Copeland As a "Police-man"These days, it's great to hear that Copeland's back in a power trio, even if — or especially because — they sound very little like The Police. Oysterhead finds him keeping time and blasting out beats with two other guys who have day jobs: Les Claypool from Primus and Trey Anastasio from Phish. Their new album, The Grand Pecking Order, is an odd but catchy compendium of funky tunes and irreverent, often politically charged lyrics that sound even more disturbing, post September 11. Copeland is understandably excited about this new venture. Speaking on the phone from Berkeley, California, one of Oysterhead's early stops on their month-long debut tour, he enthuses in a booming voice (familiar from his solo album as Klark Kent) about being on the road again. Copeland always seemed to be the least self-possessed of the Policemen and with the likes of Pink Floyd puttering in their gardens and releasing superfluous greatest hits collections, there's something refreshing about the 49-year-old drummer who's putting his old tricks to work on something new.ChartAttack: It's great to hear you're drumming again.
Copeland: It's very great to be doing it again! I stopped forever, and a lifetime went by, and I forgot about the fact that I could do that! It's coming back with much more ferocity than it ever did when I was pro, so I have the same attitude as when I was a semi-pro, which is real passionate. Because of the nature of the project, do you have fewer specific expectations than you normally would from a band?
Oysterhead for me is like a wild hobby. It's like school's out for summer. I do my job; I really enjoy my job, but I think about that Oysterhead tour coming up, and it gets closer, and it gets closer — now we're here, on the road! It's just too exciting! How's your experience of the collaborative process been?
It's very different from my film-composing work, where I serve the director: "Yes sir, no sir." The challenge for me is to make the movie work, and I'm in that process collaborating with a non-musician, creating product that has music in it — and is a strong part of it — but isn't the central factor. So when the director walks out of the studio, I am the dictatorial god of music and I hire musicians to play exactly what I want them to do... Playing in a band, there's no client, but I am collaborating with two other people about the music, and fortunately, these are two guys who are extremely inspiring; they're both bandleaders themselves and they both are alpha personalities. So it's artistically real wild, but also it's a strange trade-off.
Steward Copeland, TodayFor instance, on stage, I'm following Trey's lead completely. Trey is our stage leader. In my day, we'd figure out a set and we'd hone it and craft it, and it would be the same every night, and it would get better and better during the tour, and we'd tweak it, and everybody knew what was going to happen next, and it was all a well-laid plan. And then the next night, we'd play it again and it would be even better, tighter. But with modern groups today in general, the Phish philosophy is you make it up as you go along, so we're kind of in that mode. We don't know what's going to happen next either.There's a cartoonish and comical aspect to the music, but also a lot of darkness.
Yeah, Les is like that. He's kind of zany, but he's serious as a heart attack.Do some of the lyrics on The Grand Pecking Order seem oddly prescient today?
I've always expected the Middle East to explode. I grew up in the Middle East: I grew up in Lebanon. And I already had my eye on Afghanistan before September 11, because they were holding those foreign aid workers: a couple Americans, a couple Australians and Germans and so on. And I was wondering what the Taliban, who've long been crazy — I've been watching when they destroyed the statues, when word started coming out about the civil war they had, when [assassinated Northern Alliance leader] Masood was losing ground and these fanatics were taking over, I've sort of had my eye on Afghanistan for a while, and I never expected it to suddenly explode like this, though. Also Bin Laden, I've had my eye on him too, and the Saudis. Strange relationship between [them and] the Wahhabi sect — who are also three degrees less Draconian in their interpretation of Islam than the Taliban. What you've got to realize is that our two best friends in the Middle East — one of them [Egypt] has president-for-life Mubarrak, and the other one [Saudi Arabia] is a kingdom. Extremely repressive government.It sounds something like the idea expressed in your song "Wield The Spade."
That song was actually about Ceausescu in Romania. He was making a speech one day to the masses, who were all bussed in, and suddenly it went bad, and four days later, they shot him, the firing squad. He just went from super-dictator to man-on-the-run and the firing squad in about three or four days.You could universalize that song as well.
It's funny, a band like Oysterhead: I wrote that lyric years ago with Pat Macdonald [of Timbuk 3], and there's not too much application for a lyric like that; it ain't a love song, exactly. Your song about the scientist John C. Lilly also seems prescient.
Yeah, he just passed away a couple of weeks ago. Do the lyrics about his "rehearsing for the final act of dying" give you a weird feeling?
Oz is actually Oz Fritz, the recording engineer. And he has this [isolation] tank, which was invented by John C. Lilly [Lilly would drop acid in the isolation tank], and he was talking to us about the guy, and kind of got us going a little; that's where that lyric came from.
Steward Copeland, TodayHe sounds like an interesting character.
Yes, one of those strange post-'60s philosophers. Has anyone been calling out for obscure Klark Kent tunes?
Well, we don't play any Phish, Primus, Police or Klark Kent tunes… But there's a cover: every night in the sound check, we'll figure out a new song. Power trio stuff, you know: Zeppelin, Hendrix; we did a Who song the other day.Both you and [Police guitarist] Andy Summers are playing in power trios again.
That's right: Andy's teamed up with Dennis Chambers and Darryl Jones. I'd heard Jack Bruce from Cream was going to play bass ...
Well, Jack Bruce is just a little too weird. He kinda flaked. You're both heading back into that format!
I haven't actually heard what Andy's been up to, but I had dinner with him the other night, and he was telling me about it. Some good players, he's got.Is there something elemental about the power trio?
Yeah, there's more for everybody to do. There's no passengers; there's no, fat, no dead weight.Do you have any plans after this?
We're pretty sure that we're going to do some summer dates, come back in the summer. But the thing that makes Oysterhead exciting is that we do not have nine months booked off, and then we're going to do Europe, and then we're going to record the album in August... it's not like that in Oysterhead. All three of us have day jobs, and so Oysterhead is a hobby, which is what makes it so exciting, and we don't know what's going to happen next. Except that Oysterhead is developing its own momentum: it's kind of pulling us in, and it's going to come out and get us. It's too cool to be on stage with those two guys and lighting up an audience like that — it's just too much fun!Does it feel like you're in a time warp?
It does feel like I'm in a time warp, just because I was back in the dressing room, on stage, relearning how to live life on the road. Today I went down to the drug store and obsessed on skin care products for my calluses, just like I did 20 years ago, although they have much better products now. Spray-on skin. It's like this plastic stuff — like a liquid band-aid where you just spray it on, and it's like you're spraying on kind of a plastic layer, which works like a band-aid. And tour bus technique [Copeland affects a mechanical voice]: Getting to sleep on the bus. Remembering how to handle the laundry when on tour. [Back to normal] All these little details. Basically when you're on tour, you're either at the gig, or you're asleep or you're shopping, and not necessarily because you need to buy anything; just because you've got a few hours to kill in a strange city and you walk around and there's all kinds of bright shiny things in the store, and so you walk around there, and you feel like a pirate, scraping things off and stuffing them into your suitcase: treasure to take home.At the end of the tour, do you find you have a lot of stuff that you never really wanted or needed?
Yeah, well that's the thing. You walk around, and you see some shiny bright object, and you think, "Could I possibly ever use this?" And you stand there, and you hold it in your hand, and you think, "Well, maybe if I'm at a wedding in Hawaii, and it's a fancy dress wedding — aaahhhh, this might be the very article." So I buy it. And of course 10 years later I'll find myself in Hawaii at a wedding, and it's a fancy dress wedding, and that article that I bought for just this occasion is now lost.
Oysterhead: Steward Copeland, Les Claypool and Trey AnastasioSounds like you need to hire an archivist.
That's right, yeah.Maybe one of Trey's Phish fans?
They're good at archiving.Do you have plans to work in visual format?
No, we talked about making a video, but we just figured it wasn't worth it. So what we do instead is we have cameras running for the gigs, and one of our tour guys has got a camera, and he shoots stuff. One of my hobbies in the hotel room is cutting it together, and making little movies, which we post on the internet. If you go to oysterhead.com, you can find some of these little movies.One last question: where does the name Oysterhead come from?
Well, I wish I had a good story for you, but it's like all band names: every band has a list. I've still got The Police list of dumb names that we thought of while looking for the name of your band. We had the same problem with picking the name for your album, only it's a little easier, because you can choose a song title. But originally Les wanted to call the band Oyster, but it turned out there is another band called that. So we were running down [the names]: something Oyster — Electric Oyster, Oyster Monster, Oysterfoot, Oysterhead — and he said, "Wait wait wait wait wait: Oysterhead, Oysterhead — that's not bad!" We came back to it 24 hours later and it still wasn't totally dumb, so we went with it. And now, it has become a band. Oysterhead means this band. I can't remember what it ever might have meant before that. What were a couple of names The Police rejected?
It's too embarrassing to tell. Actually, I would tell you, because I enjoy embarrassment. But I can't remember them. But I've got the list. I've got the Police box: the original manifesto, our first photo session: I've got a box with all that original stuff in it.